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Cheney Misled GOP Leaders, New Book Says

Cheney Misled GOP Leaders, New Book Says

by

Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office in June 2006. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

A GOP congressional leader who was wavering on giving President Bush authority to wage war in late 2002 said Vice President Cheney misled him by saying that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had direct personal ties to al-Qaeda terrorists and was making rapid progress toward a suitcase nuclear weapon.

Another is the inside story about how Cheney managed the process
that led to his selection as vice president. Gellman reveals that
Cheney did not fill out his own questionnaire for potential running
mates; that ostensible top contenders for the ticket were not actually
interviewed by Cheney or Bush; that the heart surgeon who vouched for
Cheney's health never met him or reviewed his medical records; and that
longtime counselor Dan Bartlett warned Bush "we're getting our asses kicked in the media" because the campaign knew so little about Cheney's record.

Two former Republican governors, Frank Keating of Oklahoma and John Engler
of Michigan, accuse Cheney of leaking closely held information from
Keating's questionnaire in order to damage his bid for a cabinet post.
"Dick Cheney coming into my life has been like a black cloud," Keating
tells Gellman.

The Post published excerpts of the new book in Sunday's and Monday's editions. It expands on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series Gellman wrote with former Post investigative reporter Jo Becker in 2007.

"Angler" is based on hundreds of previously unpublished interviews
with present and former Cheney advisers, senior officials in federal
agencies, diplomats, judges, military officers, senators and members of
Congress. Among those who spoke on the record to Gellman are Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and his predecessor Andrew H. Card Jr., senior presidential advisers Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove, and numerous high ranking Justice Department alumni, including John Ashcroft and James B. Comey. Cheney and President Bush declined to be interviewed.

Some of the book's most significant news
describes a three-month conflict between the Justice Department and the
vice president's office over warrantless domestic surveillance. In
addition to the excerpts
published in the Post, Gellman's account of that program includes a
scene in which the top White House national security lawyer begins
hearing rumors of "the vice president's special program." John B. Bellinger III, who had not been informed of the operation, confronted Cheney's counsel, David S. Addington.

"I'm not going to tell you whether there is or isn't such a
program," Addington replied, glowering. "But if there were such a
program, you'd better go tell your little friends at the FBI and the
CIA to keep their mouths shut."

Cheney's accusations about Saddam Hussein, described by former House Majority Leader Richard Armey,
came in a highly classified one-on-one briefing in Room H-208, the vice
president's hideaway office in the Capitol Building. The threat Cheney
described went far beyond public statements that have been criticized
for relying on "cherry-picked" intelligence of unknown reliability.
There was no intelligence to support the vice president's private
assertions, Gellman reports, and they "crossed so far beyond the known
universe of fact that they were simply without foundation."
Armey had spoken out against the coming war, and his opposition gave
cover to Democrats who feared the political costs of appearing to be
weak. Armey reversed his position after Cheney told him, he said, that
the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to
portray to the public at large."

Cheney said, according to Armey, that Iraq's "ability to miniaturize
weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been
"substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result
in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel." Cheney
linked that threat to Saddam's alleged personal ties to al Qaeda, Armey
said, explaining that "we now know they have the ability to develop
these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery
system in their relationship with organizations such as al Qaeda."

"Did Dick Cheney ... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?"
Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case...Had I known or
believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the
war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have
stopped it from happening."

Gellman writes that Cheney was never the shadow president alleged by
critics. He describes a trajectory of power in which the vice president
began the first term with "a brief so wide-ranging and autonomous that
he was the nearest thing we have had to a deputy president." But after
the near-meltdown at the Justice Department in March 2004, Bush "came
to see disadvantages in the arrangement, and over time it changed."

Even when Cheney lost some of his influence, Gellman reports, he
remained effective at slow-rolling initiatives he did not like. One
senior foreign policy adviser, Aaron Friedberg, described the tactics as "rope a dope."

"Angler" recounts a meeting in the Situation Room in which the frustrated president, jamming a finger toward Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
demanded the start of long-delayed criminal proceedings against
terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. "We are going to have a
trial," Bush said, "and the proceedings are going to start by the end
of January" 2004. Cheney and Rumsfeld failed to turn up for three
consecutive meetings called by Rice to carry out the president's
command.

On their third no-show--a month after Bush's deadline expired--CIA Director George Tenet exploded in profanity, Gellman reports. And Rice began to cry.

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Further

Americans spent President's Day wishing we had one, honoring the 44 former actual ones we did have along with a few fictional contenders - Vote For Lisa Simpson! - and marching to protest the sick hollow shell of a human being now occupying a once-lofty office. Meanwhile, after just one ugly, tattered, inept, felonious year in office, The Cheeto has already been declared by 170 political pundits the worst president in history. What a surprise. Said no one ever.